’s Culture of Innovation

1. 9 Rules of Innovation from Google ’s Culture of Innovation Researcher: AminKarimi Advisor: Dr. Yakhchali University of Tehran Industries Faculty/MBA May 2010 info@aminkarimi.com

2. 9 Rules of Innovation from Google • Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience is 32-year-old with two Stanford degrees in computer science. She's also Google's high priestess of simplicity. Here she shares the rules that give the search giant its innovative edge: • Innovation, not instant perfection • Ideas come from everywhere • A license to pursue your dreams • Morph projects, don’t kill them • Share as much information as you can • Users, users, users (not money!) • Data is apolitical • Creativity loves constraints • You’re brilliant? We’re hiring

3. 1. Innovation, not instant perfection • “The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants--and making it great.' The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.”

4. Image Swirl • image-swirl.googlelabs.com

5. City Tours • citytours.googlelabs.com

6. Google Trends • google.com/trends

7. Google Translator • translate.google.com

8. Google Translate for Animals • google.co.uk/translateforanimals April Fools' Day Joke!

9. 2. Ideas come from everywhere • “We have this great internal list where people post new ideas and everyone can go on and see them. It's like a voting pool where you can say how good or bad you think an idea is. Those comments lead to new ideas.”

10. 3. A license to pursue your dreams • “Since around 2000, we let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they'll build interesting things. After September 11, one of our researchers, Krishna Bharat, would go to 10 or 15 news sites each day looking for information about the case. And he thought, Why don't I write a program to do this? That's how Google News came about. Krishna did not intend to build a product, but he accidentally gave us the idea for one.”

11. Google’s 80/20 Innovation Model • As Google’s website recruitment section explains, “All Google engineers have 20% of their time to pursue projects that they’re passionate about. This has lead to the creation of some well-known Google products, like Gmail, and Google News.

12. 4. Morph projects don't kill them • “Any project that is good enough to make it to Labs probably has a kernel of something interesting in there somewhere, even if the market doesn't respond to it. It's our job to take the product and morph it into something that the market needs.”

13. 5. Share as much information as you can • “Because there is so much information shared across the company, employees have insight into what's happening with the business and what's important. We also have people do things like Snippets. Every Monday, all the employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what you did the previous week. Being a search company, we take all the emails and make a giant Web page and index them.”

14. 6. Users, users, users • "I used to call this 'Users, Not Money.' We believe that if we focus on the users, the money will come. In a truly virtual business, if you're successful, you'll be working at something that's so necessary people will pay for it in subscription form. Or you'll have so many users that advertisers will pay to sponsor the site."

15. 7. Data is apolitical • “Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn't matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a test and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we're looking at data all the time. • We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We're trying all those different things.”

16. 8. Creativity loves constraints • “People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: 'We know you said it was impossible, but we're going to do this, this, and that to get us there.”

17. 9. You're brilliant? We're hiring • "This is just way easier than going out and trying to create all of that from scratch. That's how we're going to stay innovative. We're going to continue to attract entrepreneurs who say, 'I found an idea, and I can go to Google and have a demo in a month and be launched in six.'"

18. Project 10100 vid • Project 10100 is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. • People submitted more than 150,000 ideas. We chose a handful of finalists and you voted on your favorites. • Google will commit $10 million to implement five of those who help the most, and its goal is to help as many people as possible.

19. Innovation at Google: a model to follow? • The question is “is there a model that applies everywhere?”. And the answer is obviously not! • Google is unique. And this is in what their directors are right : they understood it, assumed it, and they built their own model instead of copying Yahoo or Microsoft. • Then, instead of discussing whether the Google model is relevant or not, benchmark, but try to build our own Google. Because: is Google Google because of the way the company operates or is the way Google operates due to the fact Google is Google?

20. Google’s success is not due to the famous “20%”, it’s because of its culture!

21. Tnx for Ur Attention! Any info@aminkarimi.com